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Needed, one U.S. Commerce secretary, preferably Republican.

Let's see.

How about George Voinovich? He's not quite as conservative as Judd Gregg, the New Hampshire Republican who decided that he's too conservative for the Obama administration.

Sen. Voinovich knows a lot of about Commerce Department issues. In withdrawing, Sen. Gregg cited the pending 2010 Census as an issue dividing him and the White House. The Census is perhaps Commerce's biggest job. Democrats worry about minorities being undercounted; the Obama White House said it wanted to have the Census director report to it, as well as the Commerce secretary.

As a former mayor of Cleveland, Sen. Voinovich is fully aware, not only of the difficulties of taking a census in a distrustful urban environment, but of the price a city and state pay for being undercounted. And yet he wouldn't be likely to lie down prostrate in front of Democratic interest groups.

Is he too old? Sen. Voinovich is only six weeks older than Sen. John McCain.

There would be downsides, of course. It's been decades since George Voinovich has worked for anybody else. He prides himself on his independence. The whole thing might not work.

How about Bob Taft? He'd be a better pick if he hadn't ended his governorship with such bad poll numbers, and if he hadn't gotten in legal trouble. But in the 2006 election to succeed him, he was treated better by Democrat Ted Strickland than by Republican Kenneth Blackwell. He's taken so many lumps from the most conservative Republicans that he'd surely have fewer qualms than Sen. Gregg about crossing the Republicans.

OK, there'd be problems with either pick. But thinking about them sheds light on this whole bipartisanship thing. Specifically, pondering only the big-name Republicans in only one state suggests that finding a Republican is a difficult task, but probably not impossible.

Sen. Gregg might have been a bridge too far. President Barack Obama is right to hold open the possibility of reaching accommodation with conservatives like him on a fair number of issues. But working together on a day-to-day basis?

President Obama has taken flak from Democrats for coddling the Republicans too much. But he should keep trying, just for his own political well-being. He has to overcome the political damage done by the stimulus package.

Typically, when one party's centerpiece thrust has the other completely up in arms and united, there's trouble ahead. Think of President Bill Clinton pushing universal health care against united Republican opposition. He not only failed to get it enacted, he experienced a political calamity in the next election, 1994.

Think about President

George W. Bush promoting the partial privatization of Social Security after his second election. Democrats got so much traction that he was never the same again. He, too, had a calamitous next election.

Or think about the time in the early 1980s when newly elected Democratic Gov. Richard Celeste rammed a tax increase through the Ohio Legislature. The Republicans took over the state Senate in 1984 and have never lost it since.

Some Democrats and Republican think the lesson is don't raise taxes. But it's really don't take your legislative majorities as proof that the public is locked into your view of the world.

The president had to push the stimulus, even without the Republicans, because his first need was to establish himself as an activist president who does not dither in handling the country's most urgent problems. But if hyperpartisanship continues to prevail, he's got a problem.